Social Media Recruiting … Research Paper

Pages: 5 (1623 words) | Style: n/a
|
Sources: 3

Employment Trends

Traditional recruitment methods

The Modern recruitment Methods

Human resources are a critical success factor in any company and are generally considered the most fundamental asset of nearly any organization. Employees can help an organization through challenging times as well as drive growth and increase market share by retaining the right employees. The value of human resources is evident by the large salaries and advancement opportunities that many organizations offer to get the best recruits that are available.

However, in the recent decades the methods in which companies recruit employees have undergone dramatic changes. In the traditional recruitment and employment process, the primary focus was to get the right candidate by delivery of the message through traditional mediums. This was done by way of advertisements in newspapers, TV and industry related magazines and literature. Candidates were then ranked and interviewed based on the information that they put on the resume (Hayes and Ninemeier).

While the aim of recruitment remains the same, the process has undergone a sea change in recent years. The advent of the internet and the spread of the social media and other job related websites have shifted the focus of reaching out to the right candidate through the internet, the social media and job specialty sites. Moreover, the resume is no more the only means to judge the ability and the qualities of a candidate. Recruiters have also resorted to the use of social media to get an idea about the candidate (Tribes and Methods).

Traditional recruitment methods

Many companies and their HR departments agree that finding out the right employee is often a difficult task. Find the best possible candidates for their organizations included several methods that traditionally recruiters attempted doing. This is because getting the right candidate for an organization is as important as securing the right contract (Hayes and Ninemeier).

Traditionally recruiters depended on reaching out to the best candidate through advertisements in local and national newspapers, depending on the requirements of the position. This method of reaching out to prospective candidates has served the traditional recruiters well over the years to attract employees and such process has been a key in defining the organizations. This was considered to be the simplest and yet the most effective of the ways to recruit traditionally (Edenborough). However, the advertiser or the company putting up the advertisement for recruitment could not be sure if the appropriate candidates would view the advertisement.

Another popular method that was employed in the traditional process of recruitment was making use of the local employment office. The employment offices contained lists of candidates and the companies could make use of the data bank in addition to the advertisements. Companies also posted their advertisements in the offices in the hope that the right candidate would also see the posting and approach the company for employment (Hayes and Ninemeier).

Private employment and recruitment agencies were also a major form of recruitment of candidates I the traditional format. The role of the employment agencies was to find out candidates and short list the candidate according to the requirements of the vacancy (Tribes and Methods). Experienced recruitment agencies were often had lists of potential candidates and were able to provide the right candidate. The companies also relied on internal hiring in the traditional format. The companies engaged in identifying suitable candidates form within the company according to the requirements of the job and the post and then either promoting or transferring them to the vacancy or job opening (Hayes and Ninemeier). Traditionally this was considered to be the safest method of finding the right candidate as the companies were already aware of the skills and the abilities of the candidate and the candidate too had developed ideas about the company. Therefore, the internal recruitment method provided the perfect cohesion of finding the right candidate and integration of the candidate with the company. However finding the right candidate form within the company was not always possible due to lack of available human resources.

The Modern Recruitment Method

In the modern era while the principles of appropriate and well-written job posting remain the same, the use of technology in the recruitment process has changed the way companies and the corporate recruit today. Those recruiters who lag behind in the use of technology for recruitment tend to fall behind in finding the right candidate for a post (Gosling and Johnson). The development of the online media has changed the sourcing role of recruitment. Companies and the corporate today utilize the internet and the social media to scout for the best and the most appropriate candidate. Hence, online sourcing for candidates has become the norm for recruiters (Schmidt & Jensen, 2012).

The entire recruiting strategy in the era of the internet and the social media has changed. In modern times, the internet and the various social media are used to conduct targeted advertisement. Though newspaper advertisements are still used to some extent, the focus has shifted to finding the right candidate from internet sources. The recruiters call this syndicated display advertising technologies which is essentially the putting up of job postings to as many candidates as possible by the automatic generation of advertisements dynamically and automatically to targeted audiences over multiple websites (Gosling and Johnson).

The technology behind this method of recruitment is the making use of cookie-based targeting to look at behaviors that are demonstrated by possible candidates and users of particular websites that indicate interests in particular career or job (Gosling and Johnson). The system directly sends recruitment advertisements to such candidates or on the websites that suits the finding of the maximum number of right candidates. Some of the examples are Monster, Career Ad Network, and Linkedin, which represent social websites that recruiters use to advertise vacancies. This allows the advertisers to address their advertisements to selected candidates- a feature that is not available in print advertising for jobs.

Such targeting advertisements enable not only reaching out to candidates that follow a particular career option but also for candidates of a particular region. Personally reaching out to the candidates is also possible through this method of modern recruitment (Schmidt and Jensen).

The use of technology and the internet media and other social media-based recruitment websites enables companies to reduce the cost of advertising for jobs. Advertising in the print media and television involves substantial costs. However, using the internet media and the social media-based recruitment sites is fairly cheap (Tribes and Methods).

Moreover, the companies are able to make pin pointed targeting for their advertisements that increases the chances of getting the right candidate. The reach of the advertisements are increased. Such advertisements are enable companies and recruiters to lure candidates who aren't actively looking for an open position but are suited for the vacancy (Gosling and Johnson). The views of job postings are increased when recruiters utilize behaviorally targeted advertisements. The recruiters as well as the companies save time and money by using the internet mediums.

Apart from the job websites, recruiters are looking actively at candidates who are mobile savvy. Many experts agree that the internet has now come to be used more and more through smart phones. The advent of smart phones has reduced the dependency on the desktop and the laptop and eliminated the constraints of place for surfing on the internet. The reduction in the costs of internet has also enabled job seeking youth using the internet through their mobile devices to surf the job sites. Therefore recruiters and corporate are essentially looking at tapping the mobile savvy candidates.

The behavior of the modern workforce has changed with respect to the way they remain connected (Edenborough). Therefore, recruiters are devising their recruitment campaigns to suit viewing on mobile phones and the trend to cater to this mobile savvy audience is being explored to a greater extent than ever before. Experts claim that the modern day job seeker tends to visit job boards and websites at frequent intervals during the day searching for new job postings. The job seeking behavior is expected to change in the coming years, especially among the young job seekers by the use of internet on the smart phones. For such candidates, the smart phone is the perfect channel for searching jobs while on the move. A healthy candidate pipeline can be maintained when recruiters utilize and support these opportunities. Many of the internet-based job portals have now developed mobile-based applications for use in smart phones (Tribes and Methods).

Another developing trend by the recruiters is to utilize the social media and putting up targeted advertisements on these sites. This is virtually free and has the potential to reach out to a vast pool of potential candidates in the most inexpensive and the fastest way. There are also communities of various job-seeking members in social media like Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, recruiters also tend to gain knowledge about shortlisted candidates from the information available on the social media. The recruiters need not depend completely on the resume of… [END OF PREVIEW]

Social Entrepreneurship
Briefly, our plan is to come up with a company to provide retired and/or retrenched professionals with a platform to equip students towards intellectual and professional development of…

Apple's Make vs. Buy Decision
Evaluating Approaches To Recruiting Most Suited for Apple's Talent Acquisition
Of the many approaches and techniques Apple could use for recruiting and talent acquisition, by…